Charles J. Petrie

Agent-based engineering, the Web, and intelligence

Web based agents show great potential for design and engineering applications. To integrate engineering agents into the Web, researchers must resolve the conflict between HTTPs client server protocol and the peer to peer protocol required by agents. The author surveys the types and definitions of agents, eventually focusing on those useful for engineering, and on how they can be integrated with the World Wide Web. Because it is simply silly to discuss software agents without distinguishing them from other types of software, the author ventures to offer a definition. It will be iconoclastic and perhaps applicable only to a certain type of engineering agent. But it will be useful in identifying some technical implementation issues.

Service agents and virtial enterprises: A survey

Implementing specific principles of academic software agents could help us build on Web service standards and finally realize the promise of a virtual enterprise.

JATLite: a Java agent infrastructure with message routing

The paper discusses JATLite, a tool for creating agent systems. It includes a message router that supports message buffering, allowing agents to fail and recover. Message buffering also supports a name-and-password mechanism that lets agents move freely between hosts.

Using Pareto optimality to coordinate distributed agents

Pareto optimality is a domain-independent property that can be used to coordinate distributed engineering agents. Within a model of design called Redux , some aspects of dependency-directed backtracking can be interpreted as tracking Pareto optimality. These concepts are implemented in a framework, called Next-Link , that coordinates legacy engineering systems. This framework allows existing software tools to communicate with each other and a Redux agent over the Internet. The functionality is illustrated with examples from the domain of electrical cable harness design.

Agent-based project management

Integrated project management means that design and construction planning are interleaved with plan execution, allowing both the design and plan to be changed as necessary. This requires that the right effects of change need to be propagated through the plan and design. When this is distributed among designers and planners, no one may have all of the information to perform such propagation and it is important to identify what effects should be propagated to whom, and when. We describe a set of dependencies among plan and design elements that allow such notification by a set of message-passing software agents. The result is to provide a novel level of computer support for complex projects.

Agent-based software engineering

It has previously been claimed that agent technologies facilitate software development by virtue of their high-level abstractions for interactions. We address a more specific characterization and utility.We believe that it is important to distinguish agent technologies from other software technologies by virtue of a set of unique software characteristics. This is in contrast to much in the literature that concentrates on high-level characteristics that could be implemented with a variety of software techniques. Agent-based software engineering (ABSE), for at least an important class of agents and applications, can be characterized by both model and inner/outer language components. Our experience in developing applications based on longterm asynchronous exchange of agent messages, similar to typical email usage, leads us to believe these unique characteristics facilitate useful software development practices. The utility derives from a stratification of change among the components, ease of collaborative change and debugging even during runtime due to asynchronous text parsing-based message exchange, and reuse of the outer language as well as generic agents as a programming environment.

Design Space Navigation as a Collaborative Aid

The Redux’ server is an agent, with no domain-specific knowledge, that provides generic coordination services to distributed design systems. The coordination is accomplished by a“wrapper” technique requiring relatively little modification of existing agents. Yet the coordination services significantly extend the usual“ask/tell” agent protocols. These advantages are obtained because the server is based on a simple and ubiquitous search-based model of design decisions. The central hypothesis is that routine design can be considered search and design agents can be coordinated by management of the search space.

Plenty of room outside the firm [Peering]

There are many ways to think about the future of computing, but to do so successfully requires looking at previous experience and predictions. The authors focus here is on computing rather than computers, though the increasing power of the latter facilitates the former. For example, the author have nothing to say about the future of multicore or parallel computing, except that beyond the Internet, the predictions for this technology have been rather optimistic for the past 30 years. This paper is all about how the author argue for the topics of future not often addressed. Some of these topics are: the authors envisioned computing application; the fall of the computing politburo; emergent collectives; everyone is a service; coordinating services; and the plenty of room for research.

User, Use & Utility Research The Digital User as New Design Perspective in Business and Information Systems Engineering

Business and Information Systems Engineering (BISE) is at a turning point. Planning, designing, developing and operating IT used to be a management task of a few elites in public ad-ministrations and corporations. But the continuous digitization of nearly all areas of life changes the IT landscape fundamentally. Success in this new era requires putting the human perspective – the digital user – at the very heart of the new digitized service-led economy.BISE faces not just a temporary trend but a complex socio-technical phenomenon with far-reaching implications. The challenges are manifold and have major consequences for all stakeholders, both in information systems and management research as well as in practice. Corporate processes have to be re-designed from the ground up, starting with the user’s perspective, thus putting usage experience and utility of the individual center stage.The digital service economy leads to highly personalized application systems while organizational functions are being fragmented. Entirely new ways of interacting with information systems, in particular beyond desktop IT, are being invented and established. These fundamental challenges require novel approaches with regards to innovation and development methods as well as adequate concepts for enterprise or service system architectures. Gigantic amounts of data are being generated at an accelerating rate by an increasing number of devices – data that need to be managed.In order to tackle these extraordinary challenges we introduce ‘user, use & utility’ as a new field of BISE that focuses primarily on the digital user, his or her usage behavior and the utility associated with system usage in the digitized service-led economy.The research objectives encompass the development of theories, methods and tools for systematic requirement elicitation, systems design, and business development for successful Business and Information Systems Engineering in a digitized economy – information systems that digital users enjoy using. This challenge calls for leveraging insights from various scientific disciplines such as Design, Engineering, Computer Science, Psychology and Sociology. BISE can provide an integrated perspective, thereby assuming a pivotal role within the digitized service led economy.

Trust-Based Facilitator: Handling Word-of-Mouth Trust for Agent-Based E-Commerce

This paper proposes a facilitator which finds capable and trustworthy partners on behalf of client users (agents), which helps agents form and maintain e-partnerships for electronic commerce. Unlike existing capability-based facilitators or matchmakers, the facilitator collects and maintains private “word-of-mouth” trust information as well as capabilities from each agent and uses the information for personalized trust-based facilitation for each agent, which is performed through the facilitation protocols and trust propagation mechanism. Compared to other existing trust mechanisms, the characteristics of trust which this facilitator handles are personalized-collaborative-subjective-qualitative-private. The facilitator is implemented as a JATLite multi-agent system and a FIPA-OS based multi-agent system, and is evaluated in terms of the complexity and characteristics. The example of usage is shown in the area of construction supply-chain coordination.